HOZELBRUCKE BRIDGE
What our Quartermaster makes of this (mis)use of issued equipment is not a matter for these records.
Not for the record, the Quartermaster, on hearing of Alisa's account, muttered, "I suppose I shouldn't call a spade a m*@#$!-f#@*@&3 spade, for it can be mightier than the sword."
If you've already done the Duresh forest then we should definitely walk a different path :)
This seems like a reasonable benefit. It's a 6-clock and a Rig action. You get +1d if you have laborers (you don't) and another +1d if Sonja helps (this costs her 1 tick on her Corruption clock).
On pg. 135 under Initial Material, it says that I can get five additional boxes of material, and specifically includes Laborers as material that I can get. So, shouldn't I have access to starting Laborers?
Also, Laborers typically just add ticks (1 per laborer, during each campaign actin phase) to projects that they can apply their labor to.
I hvea taken a look at the morale-based events. The three I think should not occur are
*Supply crates go missing
*A squad refuses to go into the field
*A deserter is caught before they can leave
If any of you who have played this before thinks that there are better (worse?) atlernatives which we should cross off instead, you should definitely feel free to chip in.
Quick question for record keeping. Did any of the Ravens take wounds or stress during the last mission?
Okay, then -- Quartermaster, finalize your resource selections, and choose your Campaign Actions!
Meanwhile, the Commander should choose a Mission Focus from among the four mission types (Assault, Recon, Religious, Supply -- see pages 316-319). Then we advance, I roll missions, and the cycle begins anew!
I choose 2 Laborers, 1 Supply Cart, 1 Blackshot, and 1 Horses as my starting materiel.
Do we have any specialists in the legion with 2 rig? I'd like to start on the Tuber wagons, with Sonia helping out.
Quick question for record keeping. Did any of the Ravens take wounds or stress during the last mission?
I think Jughead, Aron, and the Heavy have lvl 1 harm.
The Sniper has lvl 2 harm.
I hvea taken a look at the morale-based events. The three I think should not occur are
*Supply crates go missing
*A squad refuses to go into the field
*A deserter is caught before they can leaveIf any of you who have played this before thinks that there are better (worse?) atlernatives which we should cross off instead, you should definitely feel free to chip in.
I like the choices, fits the theme of a disciplined militarized group.
Okay, then -- Quartermaster, finalize your resource selections, and choose your Campaign Actions!
Meanwhile, the Commander should choose a Mission Focus from among the four mission types (Assault, Recon, Religious, Supply -- see pages 316-319). Then we advance, I roll missions, and the cycle begins anew!
I believe we will advance into the Western Front first, where the mission types available are Assault and Recon. My advice is Recon-- our Morale is high, and we need a better understanding of the enemies plans.
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I hvea taken a look at the morale-based events. The three I think should not occur are
*Supply crates go missing
*A squad refuses to go into the field
*A deserter is caught before they can leaveIf any of you who have played this before thinks that there are better (worse?) atlernatives which we should cross off instead, you should definitely feel free to chip in.
Um, if I could interject my n00b opinion.... I think the "squad refuses to go into the field" is one of the easier ones to field from that list.
I'm imagining that they would...say they don't wanna do the thing, and then um, Attero...is Attero, and then everything would be unicorn giggles and puppy hugs.
If instead we had "A fight breaks out over one Legionnaire stealing from another" I can see that turning into a quagmire...and not the good kind. It could be a lot of hard work, little information, and becoming like a Gordian Knot, or that thing about splitting the baby, and the GM easily saying "despite your efforts, half the team thinks it was the wrong call."
But worst of all, IMHO, would be "After an undead attack the Legion must break camp and relocate." Then we have an attack AND we need to move, probably before we want to.
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Okay, then -- Quartermaster, finalize your resource selections, and choose your Campaign Actions!
Meanwhile, the Commander should choose a Mission Focus from among the four mission types (Assault, Recon, Religious, Supply -- see pages 316-319). Then we advance, I roll missions, and the cycle begins anew!
It looks like the support is for Recon.
Now, you said we could use our alternate Specialists if it was called for, yeah?
It seems like a Sniper would be better for this than a Heavy.
Katya has a point in Rig, sometimes the thing you want to scrounge is behind a locked door. (Also, orphan. She doesn't talk about it but she as an interesting skill set.) She also gets +1d leading a group action, although I'm not sure if that is what i'm doing here?
Um, if I could interject my n00b opinion.... I think the "squad refuses to go into the field" is one of the easier ones to field from that list.
I'm imagining that they would...say they don't wanna do the thing, and then um, Attero...is Attero, and then everything would be unicorn giggles and puppy hugs.
Unless Aterro is the captain the squad is demanding gets replaced.
I agree "fight breaks out" and "Legion has to relocate" both sound bad as well.
Does anyone else have any thoughts?
Um, if I could interject my n00b opinion.... I think the "squad refuses to go into the field" is one of the easier ones to field from that list.
I'm imagining that they would...say they don't wanna do the thing, and then um, Attero...is Attero, and then everything would be unicorn giggles and puppy hugs.
Unless Aterro is the captain the squad is demanding gets replaced.
I agree "fight breaks out" and "Legion has to relocate" both sound bad as well.
Does anyone else have any thoughts?
Remember that you as Lorekeeper can frame the scene how you'd like, to emphasize whatever part of the story you want. So, for instance "Legion has to relocate" can just demonstrate that the Broken are pushing hard, so that the Legion needs to advance. A "fight breaks out" could be just a fisticuffs brawl which is mostly about hurt feelings. Generally speaking, I would not worry to much about the mechanical effects of the Back at Camp scenes, and merely get rid of ones that you don't want to role-play out. So in my opinion, there aren't good vs bad choices, just ones that suits ones preferences. All in all, I am happy to go with whatever you all would like.
Katya has a point in Rig, sometimes the thing you want to scrounge is behind a locked door. (Also, orphan. She doesn't talk about it but she as an interesting skill set.) She also gets +1d leading a group action, although I'm not sure if that is what i'm doing here?
[dice=Rig up the tuber cart]2d6
6 = 3 ticks for the tuber clock
+1 tick for using the laborers
+1 tick for using Sonia, right?5/6 on that clock.
There are two laborers, and both are working on crafting and rigging the wagons, but I think the ruling was that Sonia was to give 1d6 to the rig instead of a tick, so that adds up to 5/6. I'll give Sonia one corruption.
Can we firm down the fifth character? In my opinion, it needs to be an officer (or at minimum a medic). It would be very helpful to the Legion if they had the Strategist ability, and it would be a nice bonus for The Quartermaster if they has rig 2.
Factoring in feedback from the other members of the command staff and my own preferences, can I have clocks and expected benefits of the following projects:Okay. These are not final; I'm open to discussion on them. If you know of another campaign, or any forum post or other resource that discusses long term projects, feel free to bring it in.
Supply Cart -- I thought these were a resource, found not made? Acquire Asset rather than Long-Term Project?
Ballista -- As above.
Officer School -- As a campaign action, allow two characters to gain one ability advance. Intended use is mostly to promote rookies and soldiers.
Hm! Not sure about this. Could be OP. Of course, spending an action is good. Hm.
About the Supply Cart and Ballista projects, they can be acquired with assets, but the proposal here is to be able to also get them through a long term project that uses laborers. From a mechanics point of view, it is a way of utilizing laborers effectively (it would be inefficient to do this using normal campaign actions), and is based in the fiction on the ability of laborers to craft these things (Long term projects are about adding to the rules). The QM in my campaign went down this road pretty hard, and I think it would make sense for the legion to go down this path.
About officer school, this is pretty powerful, mainly due to flexibility. It is similar in raw XP to using a supply (comparable to a campaign action) to enhance recruitment to turn two rookies into soldiers, and starts about the same as Shreya's War-Saint, but will cost some number of campaign actions just to initiate and then require further campaign actions to perform, especially since I cannot argue in good faith that it is possible to use laborers on the project. There are also parameters (XP, number of characters, size of clock to research) that you can adjust if you wish.
Can I get clocks for the two alchemy projects (Fire oil, Fox snuff) that I proposed?
Nicholai is a medic and I adjusted so that he has 2 Rig since that seems like a better group need than a higher maneuver or shoot. Easy to rationalize since he's always coming up with new surgical instruments or better ways to move the wounded or replacement legs, arms, hands, etc. Not too mention a still to keep the grain alcohol flowing. I was going to put a post from him in Gameplay shortly, so I guess that will lock things down.
So a quick question. When assigning our initial 4 action points can we drop a point into one of the other Specialist Actions? For example, if I wanted to add a point in Scrounge or Aim or something?
You should defnitely correct me if I'm wrong, and I could be because this rulebook is longer than my PhD thesis, but aren't there some things that ONLY alchemists can do? If so, would it be sensible to not have Sonia take corruption on tasks that other people can do?
You should defnitely correct me if I'm wrong, and I could be because this rulebook is longer than my PhD thesis, but aren't there some things that ONLY alchemists can do? If so, would it be sensible to not have Sonia take corruption on tasks that other people can do?
So, you raise a good point, the answer to why I chose that is pretty subtle, and I am not sure if I am making the correct decision.
Yes, there are problems that only an alchemist project would answer. A mix of dealing with supernatural forces, as well as certain biological and clockwork automata effects that can't be replicated with wood and steel. From a purely administrative point of view, I haven't been given clocks for proposed alchemical projects, so I can't work on them yet. Honestly though, I was leaning against doing so anyway, because the rules for a lone alchemist is brutal. Essentially, they have trouble making progress and pick up corruption very quickly, compared to having multiples.
So, the question is, do we sit on the alchemist until we get to Plainsworth and hire a second (and hopefully then a third), or do we risk using the alchemist now? In my other campaign, he rode the first alchemist hard, and it paid off, but he rolled amazingly on the first couple clocks, and picked up a ton of corruption on the first alchemist right away. So, if the first hadn't worked out, it would have been pretty bad. As it is, the three alchemists in that campaign are on the verge of collapse, and we aren't yet to Fort Calisco.
So, I viewed using Sonia on the project to be something she can work on in the mean time, and viewed the 1 corruption to be not too bad a trade off.
Is it possible to just consider that Sonia was helping in a purely mundane manner on the Tuber farm and using Nicholai the Noose on the project (who has 2 rig naturally), saving Sonia the corruption? In this manner, Sonia is helping in the fiction, but not actually affecting the mechanical result.
Also, to answer the question in advance, when the Quartermaster is asked if he is spending horses on the advance, he says "Nyet! Do you think I can just @&#%@ horses from my @$$?"
Algebriac combinatorics sounds hardcore! Respect :) Mine was in microbiology & virology, looking at whether bacteriophages can be made into antibiotics (tl;dr conclusion - possibly, but it's complicated and we're not there yet). and before you ask, no, I know next to nothing about coronaviruses beyond what everyone has learne din the last 12 months.
Alchemy is a trick one, isn't it? Maybe you need to think about what projects we want our alchemist(s) to work on and how many clocks that involves and therefore how many dice rolls we're likely to need them to make in order to get there. You did maths, right? ;)
To answer your other question, swearing doesn't bother me in the slightest. Morbid and creepifying is also ok, I don't squick easily (the benefits of studying biology im all its forms). Sexuality can be an issue just because of past tabletop experiences (there was a point where I basiclly only played male PCs) but as long as mature themes are handled with maturitry and nobody tries to hit on me either direcltly or thru my character* we should all be fine.
So a quick question. When assigning our initial 4 action points can we drop a point into one of the other Specialist Actions? For example, if I wanted to add a point in Scrounge or Aim or something?
That is a good question, I think we'll need a GM ruling on this. From my reading of the book, I would guess no-- that it is upon gaining playbooks or due to something special happening in play that would allow someone to assign points to a specialist action that that character has not at some point had the playbook.
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(there was a point where I basically only played male PCs)
So many questions....
1) Baseline question: Do you believe romance between two characters can ever be handled in such a way to enhance gameplay fulfillment, or are you of the belief that such a topic is either always detrimental to the role playing, or that such is always an ulterior RL tactic?
2) Have you ever had a female character hit on your male character? If so, how did it go? If not, can you imagine a scenario where that would be more productive?
(corollary: Two of my favorite characters to play are female and both of them are SCREAMING at me to let them out and get a word in here. Imma resist, for now. =-)
I have found that PbP is the greatest, most "pure" role-play experience there is. The people on here only know anyone by their role play work-product, so there is motivation to make that the best you can. So to, isolated from almost -all- RL issues, one can step back and only experience life through the character's eyes.
I mean, there are limits, of course. If you know some user as a weaksauce role-player, there's no way you would let yourself open up to them to try and get a deeper experience. It just wouldn't work.
But for someone who has the talent for such a thing? It can really help develop the head-space a particular character occupies.
IMHO. YMMV.
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Honestly though, I was leaning against doing so anyway, because the rules for a lone alchemist is brutal. Essentially, they have trouble making progress and pick up corruption very quickly, compared to having multiples.
So, I viewed using Sonia on the project to be something she can work on in the mean time, and viewed the 1 corruption to be not too bad a trade off.
I am really rooting for Sonia. My first instinct is that we should totally have an Alchemist just so Sonia can follow in old Gurgle' footsteps, but on the other hand being able to play Sonia would be amazing.
Am Confused now.
Dean C, are you going back on your initial instinct about getting the alchemist? It sounds like you were for having one alchemist, and now less so.
I just need to know if we're giving up on Alchemists in case it comes up in a future mission.
Honestly though, I was leaning against doing so anyway, because the rules for a lone alchemist is brutal. Essentially, they have trouble making progress and pick up corruption very quickly, compared to having multiples.
So, I viewed using Sonia on the project to be something she can work on in the mean time, and viewed the 1 corruption to be not too bad a trade off.
I am really rooting for Sonia. My first instinct is that we should totally have an Alchemist just so Sonia can follow in old Gurgle' footsteps, but on the other hand being able to play Sonia would be amazing.
Am Confused now.
Dean C, are you going back on your initial instinct about getting the alchemist? It sounds like you were for having one alchemist, and now less so.
I just need to know if we're giving up on Alchemists in case it comes up in a future mission.
No, not giving up on Alchemists, just wanting to wait until we get the second before going deploying them. I am committing a campaign action in Plainsworth in getting Sonia an assistant/colleague. Having the one alchemist in #12 (Sonia) gives us a great base for alchemical engineering, and just want to safeguard that investment.
The Soviets were very into using phages, right? And that particular baby sort of got thrown out with the post-Soviet bathwater?
Oh gosh, I really, really hope that soemeday someone writes a holistic account of science in the Soviet era, I would certainly read it. It's just so amazingly insane, there's this incredible technological ability (first object, animal and human in space) but it's so disjointed. The Americans got a huge amount of other stuff from their space program, like the JPL and advances in telescopy like the Hubble and it all advanced coherently, if you know what I mean. The Soviets jsut didn't do it that way, and all their science was underpinned by this crazy ideolgoy that you had to sign up to if you wanted to live. Which is fine in the more abstract scientific fields like maths, you can just say "Yay Lenin! I present thesis on latest geometrical topogrophies, for benefit of Motherland and ruin of capitalist pigdogs" and it's all fine. But the more real you get, the harder that becomes, and there isn't much more real than biology (and engineering of course, but I'm talking about science here). And after Lysenko killed Vavilov in an argument over genetics (no, really) then doing theory becomes almost impossiblle. Which meant you've got these huge gaps in theoretical understanding. And the microbiology at the time was just so poorly understood, if you don't have a grasp of the theories underlying it then it's basically alchemy and witchcraft.
Obviously the scientists in those fields knew that, they weren't stupid, they were allowed to attend international conferences so they had some grasp of what was going on in their field. They must have known that most of what thye were writing was witchcraft, and it's so frustrating because buried in there are some creative and interesting ideas. Did you know that they experimented with using induced hypothermia (basically freezing the patient almost to death) in place of anesthesia? Mostly becuase they didn't have enough anaesthetic drugs, I suspect. But it worked. And it's the same with the phage work, although if you had antibiotics you'd definitely rather use them than the concoctuions the Sovients were using. There's almost no real theoretical understanding, so it's effectively a cargo cult approach to science. It's kind of like the mouldy bread poultices from teh middle ages: if you're very very VERY lucky then the mould you're about to put on your open wound is a Penicillium rather than something toxic.
Um, if I could interject my n00b opinion.... I think the "squad refuses to go into the field" is one of the easier ones to field from that list.
I'm imagining that they would...say they don't wanna do the thing, and then um, Attero...is Attero, and then everything would be unicorn giggles and puppy hugs.
Unless Aterro is the captain the squad is demanding gets replaced.
I agree "fight breaks out" and "Legion has to relocate" both sound bad as well.
Does anyone else have any thoughts?
Just circling back to this quickly. If I'm understanding this correctly, we were talking about the 'Back at Camp' scene. We could use the 'squad refuses to deploy' but base it on alchemical food poisoning from a bad fish taken from the river downstream from the bridge and served by a rookie cook. Per Nikolai's post, maybe the whole squad of Lions get sick for a rotation so they aren't available during the next mission as it'll take a while for the doc to mix up enough of the cure for everyone (and to make sure it works). We could also roll for the squad affected randomly, maybe excluding the Ravens since they were out on the mission.
About the Supply Cart and Ballista projects, they can be acquired with assets, but the proposal here is to be able to also get them through a long term project that uses laborers. From a mechanics point of view, it is a way of utilizing laborers effectively (it would be inefficient to do this using normal campaign actions), and is based in the fiction on the ability of laborers to craft these things (Long term projects are about adding to the rules). The QM in my campaign went down this road pretty hard, and I think it would make sense for the legion to go down this path.
Hm! Okay. But for balance, it should be at least as hard to get using this Action as using Acquire. No?
About officer school, this is pretty powerful, mainly due to flexibility. It is similar in raw XP to using a supply (comparable to a campaign action) to enhance recruitment to turn two rookies into soldiers, and starts about the same as Shreya's War-Saint, but will cost some number of campaign actions just to initiate and then require further campaign actions to perform, especially since I cannot argue in good faith that it is possible to use laborers on the project. There are also parameters (XP, number of characters, size of clock to research) that you can adjust if you wish.Fair; I see that.
More in a bit...
For reference, the DM in my f2f game set both supply carts and a basic siege weapon (which ended up being the ballista) as 4-clocks, which without laborers would cost two campaign actions, and also required a source of wood nearby, which has been true for that campaign in the start. So, without the laborers, constructing them this way would likely be worse than two gather asset campaign actions, but the laborers make the project more palatable.
Also, the commander should make a 1d6 advance action. I can make the roll if he wants to delegate it.
Atterro, I missed your questions earlier in my enthusasm to talk shop. I'm not really sure how to answer them, I think all I can say is what I said in another PbP campaign I'm in which is that I understand that roleplay games give a chance to play someone you're not, whether that's an elf, a wizard, a member of the opposite sex or pretty much whatever, as well as explore more, um, mature themes along the way - if that's your thing. As long as it's handled maturely (no "lolbewbs"), I'm fine with it. For my part, my characters have alwasy been asexual because the whole 'romance' thing isn't what I'm looknig for in a roleplay game. But I'm not against other players indulging themselves. I also don't have an issue with a PC (or NPC like Jughead) hitting on my character, as long as the players understand that nothing is ever going to happen or try to force the issue.
And I agree 100% with you that this forum is a great place to be. I had some reservations when I signed up (because, you know, Internet) but outside of WW's old gaming group this is the most fun and safe gaming I've had in ages :)
And after Lysenko killed Vavilov in an argument over genetics (no, really) then doing theory becomes almost impossiblle. Which meant you've got these huge gaps in theoretical understanding. And the microbiology at the time was just so poorly understood, if you don't have a grasp of the theories underlying it then it's basically alchemy and witchcraft.I've spent most of the last 15 years living in post-Soviet countries, so... yeah.
Wow. Are you in internatinal development? I'm guessing public sector or charities, most companies don't keep people in place that long. But I could be wrong :)
Despite my roots (my great-great grandfather was Russian) I've never got furter east than Poland, which was pretty civilised, I thought. But I gather that there's "post-Soviet" and "post-Soviet."
And yet! My personal favorite (sic) incident is the 1977 Aral Sea smallpox outbreak. There was a bioweapons lab on an island, and somehow the virus spread to a freighter that was *going past the island without stopping*, and it got to a port town. Whatever it was, it wasn't ordinary smallpox. Best guess is that they'd done transmissibility enhancement through simple selective breeding, like that one guy did with ferret flu in 2011 or so.
"And THAT'S when we all made a pinky-swear to never tell anyone we'd crossed Ebola with the common cold!"
My god, thugh. People go on and on and on about Chernobyl but the death toll tehre was limited to the thousands. Lysenko's refusal to accept Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory (he wrongly favoured Lamarckism) killed millions.
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I had thought it a good compromise. Since this is PbP where more usually means slower, for the price of only have 4 PCs in a system that quite certainly says it will need 5 specialists, we could have the advantage of swapping characters out, taking who we thought might be better on a particular mission.
That way the PC's get a boon--the ability to pick a weapon of choice--and the GM doesn't have to mess with 5 characters.
If that isn't the case--that we have to make do with only 1 character until it dies--which makes our 2nd PC not so much a secondary character as just a replacement--then we really should let Dean C get going on making a 5th specialist for him to play, since the system calls for that.
I had thought it a good compromise. Since this is PbP where more usually means slower, for the price of only have 4 PCs in a system that quite certainly says it will need 5 specialists, we could have the advantage of swapping characters out, taking who we thought might be better on a particular mission.
That way the PC's get a boon--the ability to pick a weapon of choice--and the GM doesn't have to mess with 5 characters.
If that isn't the case--that we have to make do with only 1 character until it dies--which makes our 2nd PC not so much a secondary character as just a replacement--then we really should let Dean C get going on making a 5th specialist for him to play, since the system calls for that.
Actually, about half of the time we won't be playing specialists during missions, we'll be playing rookies (or later soldiers as the rookies get seasoned). I for one really like playing rookies (only way to have Naive Hope as an item :) ).
We should (as a group, or possibly delegated to someone, usually it is the marshall's job) create a fifth specialist so that we know what resources the legion has available to it. We'll need to send a specialist on each secondary mission, and sometimes a specialist will be recuperating, so we'll end up with a de facto rotation for them.